


the genesis of rhythm

by jestbee



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Inspired by Poetry, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:14:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25800421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jestbee/pseuds/jestbee
Summary: It isn't the paintings he is here for. It isn't the stall with mismatched shelves and the rows of books in a language he can't understand. It is the man with the brush.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 14
Kudos: 51





	the genesis of rhythm

**Author's Note:**

> Just a thing inspired by [this moodboard](https://midnightradio.tumblr.com/post/624020600833327105/im-a-hot-knife-hes-a-pat-of-butter) and litany in which certain things are crossed out by Richard Siken
> 
> There's no definitive getting together, it's just a short tableau of a feeling or vibe, but it feels complete to me anyway.

His view down the unnamed street is the same every day. Clusters of umbrellas over tables he will never sit at and the washed-out horizon of a world coming out of sleep. The air is haunted by the scent of coffee brewing, the melodic sound of a foreign language on the humid breeze. Dan inhales the world and it unfurls in his chest. 

"Are you writing?" his agent asks. 

_Always,_ Dan thinks. If writing is the act of pen to paper, or of words to page. But none of it fits together the way he wants it to.

"I'm writing," he tells her, over and over. He sends her scattered, unfulfilled drafts and listens to the puckered sound of her pretending he isn't unravelling. 

"It just isn't—" she sighs. 

It isn't what it was. He cannot make it work.

In the early morning, bathed in a newborn-pink sky, freckles waking up along the bridge of his nose to bathe in more of that Mediterranean sun, Dan stretches a hand across the ocean to reach for— what? There is nothing reaching back. 

Cobbled streets welcome him, his feet uneven, steps skipped. He strolls, ambles, gets lost and hopes he isn't found. The market swallows him. Voices chorus from every angle and he stops where he always does. 

A row of painted canvases, propped up - one on another, face down on the next. He takes the first one in hand, the cool crispness of it against unworthy palms, and views what it is covering. They stack, leaning forward one by one to reveal yet another picture underneath. 

He wishes it were that easy to see the underneath of him. To put pen to paper and stack the pages. Create something. Make it work. 

It isn't the paintings he is here for. It isn't the stall with mismatched shelves and the rows of books in a language he can't understand. It is the man with the brush. 

It's the fragile wrist smeared with mauve paint where the bone juts out, the arch of a foot against the cobbles, tapping a rhythm in his head that Dan can't hear out loud. 

"Back again?" the man says. 

His cheeks are pink, kissed by the blistering heat. He doesn't belong here either, but Dan doesn't know his story any more than he understands his own. 

"Just passing through," Dan tells him. 

Behind them, someone calls his name through a pair of cracked shutters. 

"Phil." 

Dan puts the pencil down on his memory and jots that one down. He tries it on his tongue, silently, just to see how it feels. 

"Are you going to steal something if I go inside?" Phil puts the paintbrush behind his ear. There is a swatch of blue at his hairline, blurred paint into the strands of hair at his temple.

_Duck egg_ , Dan thinks. _Sky._

"Your paintings are safe," Dan assures him. 

Phil shrugs at him, a pinched crease in the centre of his face like he can't comprehend what safety would have to do with stealing. 

Phil rises from his seat and it occurs to Dan that he has never seen him stand. The tableau he has of this man is a still-life. An artist at a canvas, the act of it more important than the creation. It has become the image he sees when he closes his eyes. When the door to his balcony is thrown wide, and the sun throws stripes across his rented floors, Dan sweats under a slow ceiling fan and thinks of the man with the brush. 

He has morphed into something else. An augmentation, a symbol. He is the untapped process of creation. Work stacked on work, worlds created where Dan only stalls. 

He paints in technicolour. His palette is full, imagination never ending.

_How do you pick up the brush every day?_ Dan wants to ask him. 

"Do you sell many?" is what he actually asks when Phil comes back. 

Phil tilts his head, his hair fanned out. "Is that what's important?"

Dan hadn't thought so. It had been the creating that he'd been interested in. Until that stopped too. 

Dan selects one at random. Vines, leaves, something impressionistic that reminds him far more of home than it does these sun-drenched streets. 

He passes Phil the last of the money in his pockets and tucks the canvas under his arm. 

"What will you paint next?" Dan asks. 

He needs to know what happens. How the creation continues once it has been exchanged and no longer belongs to you. Stealing isn't what jeopardizes safety. Possession does. 

Phil's head tilts in the opposite direction. There is a freckle on his throat. 

"What I can," Phil says. 

"Is that enough?" 

"It will have to be." 

The vines stare at him from the wall. The plaster is cracked, and his cursor blinks at the end of an unfinished sentence. Dan searches for an adjective and comes up short.


End file.
